Articles

When we speak of “test ethics,” the given examples usually are trivial dilemmas. Do we avoid reporting a bug? Do we report that testing is progressing as planned, even though it’s definitely late? These questions are kids stuff: easy because the situation is so black-and-white. But life will present you with complicated cases where the answer is not that obvious.

Boundary value analysis is a stable of test design, but sometimes the boundaries are not so obvious to the black-box tester. These are called hidden boundaries. This article provides several examples of hidden boundaries, along with some tips to design your test plan in order to reveal hidden boundaries.

With 2018 well underway, it seems like a good time to look ahead and think about what we hope to accomplish this year. Find out which agile trends these software experts are most looking forward to in the coming months.

Digital accessibility aims to make any software usable by the widest possible audience. Assistive technology tools, such as screen readers, can help testers model interactions of users with special needs. But testing software design and implementation requires particular test techniques and a certain mindset: You need to think not like the builder of a house, but like the person who will make it their home.

If you're in a line of e-commerce that sometimes experiences site-crashing levels of volume, executing periodic stress tests is part of a good business plan. Nels Hoenig works for an electric company, so for his site, the main source of stress is power outages. Here, he details his search for a stress-testing tool, what he learned from the tests, and how he convinced others of the value of these tests.

Pair testing can be done with various disciplines within the software development lifecycle. It has many advantages, both for the quality of the product and the benefit of the testers, and it doesn’t require any special training. You only need two brains and two pairs of eyes. Would your team try pair testing?

With the rise of technology like AI and practices like DevOps, teams everywhere are looking for ways to speed up testing without sacrificing quality. The articles in 2017 reflect that, with the most popular topics being test automation, testing machine learning systems, next-generation exercises, and the future of software testing. If you're looking for cutting-edge testing techniques, check out this roundup.

While some testers are unfamiliar with test execution automation, the growing trend into automation necessitates new skills for manual testers. Project test teams need to become aware of this trend, as automation represents not only business opportunities, but also increased quality and fewer risks in complex, safety-critical, and mission-dependent projects.

In testing, a tour is an exploration of a product that is organized around a theme. Tours bring structure and direction to exploration sessions, so they can be used as a fundamental tool for exploratory testing. They're excellent for surfacing a collection of ideas that you can then further explore in depth one at a time, and they help you become more familiar with a product—leading to better testing.

When can a bug report be considered redundant because it is already reported in the bug management system? If you ask the developers, if two bugs are caused by the same mistake in the code, it’s enough to report one of them. But Michael Stahl has good arguments from a tester's perspective about why it's better to err on the side of over-reporting bugs.